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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a